Читать книгу Bombshell - Lynda Curnyn - Страница 10

“Give a man a free hand and he’ll run it all over you.”

—Mae West

If Roxanne Dubrow’s new marketing plan sent a shudder through Claudia, it was like a balm to my soul. As I put together an agenda for the coming month, filled with meetings with New Product Development, entertaining bids from ad firms, talking with the sales reps about in-store positioning, I knew I was going to be okay. Even Lori seemed to shrug off her own personal crisis when I filled her in on what needed to be done for the new campaign. Maybe it was the excitement of seeing the new product that would one day be Roxy D, as boxes of Sparkle had already been shipped in from the Dubrow compound on Long Island for us to review. Or maybe it was the dozen long-stems Dennis had sent, which seemed to ameliorate any wounds his newly announced future plans had caused. For a brief moment, I even hoped for my own long-stems—not that I wanted Ethan back, but a girl did like a man to grovel a bit. Although I hardly expected that from Ethan. One of the few things he and I had in common was a stubborn streak a mile wide.

Besides, I had already begun to build up a wall of indifference to him.

So I was dually armed when I found myself sitting before the one person whose whole purpose, at least for the forty-five minutes a week we spent together, was to probe at whatever feelings she believed I was having.

Shelley Longford, my therapist.

“You broke up with him?” Shelley said after I had blithely related the story of my mishap with Ethan, after spending more than half the session seated in the chair across from her in a tiny, nondescript office on the fourth floor of an equally nondescript office building on W. 72nd Street, relating the more mundane details of my life. The new campaign at Roxanne Dubrow. The fact that I was having trouble getting my super to come up and fix a crack that had begun in the ceiling of my pretty, albeit ancient, bathroom. I think I was starting to bore myself, which probably made me blurt out the news of my breakup.

In truth, I took a certain satisfaction in the shock that wreathed Shelley’s normally composed features. I had been seeing her just four months, and this was the first time I seemed to get some sort of rise out of her. The most I had seen before was a nervous tuck of that shiny dark hair behind her ear, or a narrowing of her dark eyes. Now, after her somewhat harried exclamation, I felt a sort of…triumph.

“Well, what would you have done?” I asked now, knowing she would somehow find a way to turn the question back on me. This therapy business was so tricky, and if it hadn’t been for the endless prodding of the social worker on my case, I wouldn’t even be here. It was so pointless somehow. I had been coming once a week for four months now, sitting across from a woman I didn’t know—and didn’t want to know, judging by the tastefully drab decor of her office, her bad haircut, her aloof manner and the fact that I was paying her $140 for forty-five minutes of relative silence while she asked questions that seemed to have nothing to do with me. Questions that always seemed to lead to one answer—an answer I refused to give her.

“Well, there are a lot of things one could do in a situation like the one you experienced with Ethan,” Shelley began, carefully leaving herself out of the answer as I’m sure she was trained to do. See what I mean? How can you warm up to someone like this?

I raised my eyebrows, stubbornly resisting the impulse to make life easier for her as I waited for her to fill me on all these options I allegedly had now that Ethan Lederman the Third had accidentally let a few of his precious sperm loose in a woman he had been sleeping with for months, yet somehow couldn’t see himself actually propagating with.

“You could have talked,” she said, after a lengthy pause. A pause that cost me quite a few bucks at these rates. I could have invested in the new Stila lip shade with more result.

“About?” I said, not wanting to give her anything.

“Your options,” she said.

“Options?” I began, feeling my temper suddenly—and surprisingly—spike. “Let’s see, what exactly were the options that Ethan Lederman the Third presented me with? Ah, yes. There was the douche—very clever on his part. Made me wonder if he’d ever been down this road before. Oh, and then there was the morning-after pill. That’s right. Get rid of it before it even gets started. Nice clean solution. Better than say, throwing it in the Hudson after it was born….”

When I saw I had not managed to make a dent in that composure of hers, I continued, “Look, the bottom line is he wanted nothing to do with anything real between us. It was all too glaringly apparent that he didn’t want a child with me. That he didn’t want…me.”

This last word came out on a squeak, making me realize how dangerously close to tears I was. I grabbed the arms of the chair to take the tremble out of my fingers. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, a voice inside me chanted. Within moments, I managed to swallow back whatever emotions threatened. But it was too late.

Shelley Longford had seen it all. And I knew exactly where she was going to go with it.

As it turned out, I only had to endure another ten minutes of therapy. Ten minutes of avoiding the truth Shelley tried to gently guide me to, but which I strictly avoided at all costs. I even hated the words: fear of rejection. Her next maneuver was to try and—gently but persistently—tie it all back to my mother. Not my mother, really. My mother was a perfectly nice, perfectly respectable music teacher, now retired and living with my perfectly respectable father in New Mexico. What Shelley wanted to talk about was the woman who gave birth to me. Kristina Morova, who, as I learned three years ago after months of digging through public records, resided a train ride away from me in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. And refused to acknowledge my existence. The only response I had gotten to the certified letter I had finally gotten up the courage to send to her seven months ago was the return receipt with her signature on it. A hastily scrawled “K. Morova” that I had run my fingers over at least a dozen times since I had found it in my mailbox. No note inviting me to meet her at some mutually acceptable location, so that I might get answers to all those questions that had plagued me for most of my life and, for some reason, even more so after I turned thirty. No tearful phone call to express her joy at the possibility of meeting the child she’d given up, for reasons as yet unknown to me, at the age of seventeen.

Nothing.

I had been told ahead of time by the search agency that this was one possible outcome. In fact, this was the reasoning behind sending a certified letter in the first place, so that I could be assured that the letter had been received and that I would, at least, be saved from any emotional trauma caused by a random postal error. Yes, now I knew that whatever emotional trauma I was allegedly dealing with, according to Shelley, had to do with the simple fact that my mother knew I was alive but didn’t want to know me.

I had accepted this realization with the same type of angry calm with which I had tossed Ethan out of my apartment a week earlier. Fuck him, I had thought as I watched him angrily pull on his clothes and make tracks out my front door.

Fuck her, I had thought after enduring the two weeks of complete silence that followed the sending of my letter. Yes, I had been disappointed, but even more, I had been mad. Mad at her for not caring. So mad, in fact, that I had taken a car service out to her modest two-family house in Sheepshead Bay, only to stand outside filled with a desire to take the pretty little planter at the center of her neatly edged lawn and toss it through her front window.

I didn’t, of course.

Instead, I had gotten back into the car, sinking into comfortable anonymity behind the tinted windows, and had gone to see Barbara, the social worker who assisted me with my search. And after listening to me rail for half an hour over everything from Kristina Morova’s impossibly well-kept flower bed to her frailty as a human being, Barbara had finally managed to convince me to do what she had been trying to get me to do since I had taken up my search. Seek counseling.

Not that the sixteen weeks I had been seeing Ms. Shelley Longford, C.S.W., with a specialization in psychotherapy, had made a bit of difference.

Even now as I carefully let myself out of her office after assuring her that yes, I would be there the following Wednesday at six-thirty, I wondered why I bothered.

I was fine really. I had all the information I really needed to know about Kristina Morova. That she was one of two daughters. That there was no real history of disease in her family, other than a few diabetics and some spotty cancer.

I mean, strictly speaking, I really didn’t need to know anything else, right?

“How are you really, Grace?” Angie said as we sat over drinks the following evening at Bar Six, a little bistro in the West Village.

“I’m fine,” I assured her for the third time since we’d sat down, martinis before us. I didn’t want to get into an analysis of the demise of my recent relationship, knowing full well that Ethan had likely not even given it a second thought himself. That was the annoying little difference between men and women. When a man exited a relationship, no matter who ended it, it was as if the woman was erased from his mind. Women, on the other hand, could be borderline obsessive, measuring every perceived slight, every phone call or lack thereof, and coming up with a complex analysis of his emotional makeup.

I decided to take the male tack, effectively erasing Ethan from my own mind and turning the conversation to what I hoped would be a more fruitful subject. Angie. “So what’s going on with the show?”

Angie was an actor and had, a year earlier, gotten her first big break when she’d landed a primetime drama on Lifetime, playing Lisa Petrelli, single mom and NYPD cop. Though the show hadn’t garnered huge ratings, Angie had gotten a nice bit of critical notice for what Entertainment Weekly had called her “endearingly anxious” portrayal of a woman struggling to raise two kids and save the world, or at least the New York City precinct that was her beat, from crime. The funny thing was that all of that endearing anxiety came from the fact that Angie herself had never encountered child-rearing first hand and was mostly struggling to keep from being railroaded by the two child actors who played her kids.

“The network is reviewing its programming as we speak. But it’s looking like a second season might be too much to hope for,” she said, fresh anxiety washing over her features. With her large, dark eyes, heart-shaped face and deep brown shoulder-length locks, my friend Angie is almost a dead ringer for Marisa Tomei. Not that I ever would say that to her—she’s heard it often enough over the years. But she made her peace with it once she earned some critical acclaim of her own as Angie DiFranco, obsessive-compulsive-yet-utterly-charming actor. That boost to her career has resulted in a subsequent boost to her self-esteem. I have known Angie since we shared secrets and sorrows at Marine Park, where I lived until my parents decided that Brooklyn was turning me into too much of a bad-ass teen and dragged me off to Long Island at age sixteen. Angie and I stayed friends, spending our summers together on the beach, then once I got my driver’s license, weekends filled with shopping, club-hopping and, when we both managed to have boyfriends at the same time, double-dating. In all the years I have known her, I have never seen Angie look so radiant. It was as if her life were finally coming together, though the nervous frown now marring her pretty features suggested otherwise. Sometimes my friend Angie, who had an acting career on the rise, an amazing boyfriend and a rent-stabilized two bedroom in the East Village, needed to be reminded of just how magnificent her life was.

“Maybe that’s for the best,” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to start working on Justin’s film in the spring?” Her boyfriend was a screenwriter who had received much critical acclaim himself for the feature-length film he’d made as a film student years ago. Now he had a brand-new screenplay and a leading lady, as he’d written a part especially for Angie.

“Yeah, we’re starting in April….” she said, beginning to gnaw at her lower lip at the very thought.

It wasn’t that Angie didn’t believe in her talented boyfriend. It was just that, despite the steadying assurance his love gave her, she was given to panic over anything that she didn’t know the outcome of beforehand. Which was just about everything, I supposed.

“Well, then, there you go,” I said. “Your future’s so bright, you’re gonna have to go out and purchase a pair of Ray•Bans.”

“I guess,” she said, unconvinced. I had known Angie so long, I could practically read her mind. See the little hamsters of anxiety on the wheel of her thoughts, running frantically on those “what ifs” that plagued her. What if I can’t carry the role? What if I get some life-threatening disease? Her father had died of cancer and like her equally neurotic mother, Angie seemed to think her own death by malignant cell growth was a foregone conclusion. And, most importantly and probably the real source of her anxiety, what if I’m a complete and utter failure?

“You’re going to do great,” I said, picking the anxious thought out of her brain before she could voice it. I had heard the spiel one too many times: It happened whenever Angie embarked on a new gig.

She gave me a sheepish smile. “But what about you, Grace?”

“What about me?” I said. “I have a new campaign at work,” I said, reminding her of Roxanne Dubrow’s new mission, which I had filled her in on earlier. “And since Claudia’s in denial about the whole younger, brighter, better schtick the powers that be are on, I may have to shoulder a lot of the burden of developing it myself.”

“I mean what are you going to do about Ethan?”

“What’s to be done?” I replied with a shrug. “It’s over.”

She pursed her lips, as if aware she was treading on territory I didn’t want to traverse. “I mean, don’t you think you guys should talk? For closure?”

“I got all the closure I need,” I said. Like Ethan, I was capable of walking away without a backward glance. Which was why I was sure Ethan was doing just fine without me. Just like Michael Dubrow was apparently, I thought, the reminder of Claudia’s suggestion that he had moved on to his next “piece of ass” sending a surprising flood of anger through me. I shrugged it off. I guess that was just the kind of man I was attracted to: independent or, as all the self-help books Angie had tried to foist on me of late put it, “emotionally unavailable.”

“Well, what does Shelley think?” she asked. Now I knew Angie was desperate to probe my inner state. Because in the months I’d been seeing Shelley, Angie had acted a bit like my therapist was the enemy, siding with me whenever I found fault, which was often, with the woman I was paying 140 bucks a session to cure me from whatever she believed ailed me. I secretly thought Angie was a bit jealous of Shelley. I guess she figured I should be able to confess all to her and get the advice I needed. She was, after all, my best friend.

“Oh, you know her,” I said. “She’s always trying to tie everything back to Kristina. Some perceived slight she thinks I’ve suffered from a woman I’ve never met.” I waved a hand in the air, hoping to communicate the blandness I felt inside. “I thought I was safe from all that crap when I went to a psychoanalyst. Maybe I’m not remembering my Freud right, but isn’t it my father who’s supposed to fuck up my emotional life?” I sputtered out a mirthless laugh. What father? The original birth certificate I had managed to track down hadn’t listed one. And the father who raised me was probably a candidate for Man of the Year, judging by the way everyone—my mother, his students, even the neighbors—worshiped him.

Now Angie was studying me as if, for a change, she thought my therapist might be on to something. “Another martini?” I said, downing the last of mine.

She frowned.

“C’mon, Ange,” I said, trying to rouse her. “This is New York City. There are plenty of men—” I waved a hand at our waiter, who I noticed was a particularly fine example of the breed “—and Stolichnaya to go around.”

And plenty of work to do, I realized. But I was feeling more than up to it. It was a good thing, too, because Claudia had picked up the smoking habit she had given up months earlier after she had discovered a new line in her upper lip. Apparently she had bigger things to worry about now that Roxanne Dubrow had ruined her life, as she alleged whenever she returned reeking of smoke from the handicapped bathroom. I didn’t mind her frequent absences, seeing as I felt like I could run this campaign single-handedly, with the assistance of Lori, of course.

But Claudia roused herself from her nicotine stupor just in time for the focus group testing. Because if we hoped to understand the desires, and insecurities, of the 18-to-24-year-old set just as keenly as we understood the desires, and insecurities, of the over-30 set, we needed to do some research. Even Dianne left the Dubrow family enclave in Old Brookville, Long Island, where she ran the Dubrow empire practically from the comfort of her home, to personally conduct the research. Although the building complex that housed Research and Development and one of our manufacturing complexes was only a short drive away in Bethpage, the market tests would be conducted in Cincinnati and Minneapolis. As VP of Marketing, Claudia had gone, too.

Though I was surprised I hadn’t been invited this time, I didn’t mind. In truth, I always found focus group research, although necessary in many ways, borderline ridiculous. As if the New Yorker in me, the woman who had been born and bred in the shopping mecca of the world, couldn’t completely wrap my mind around the idea that a bunch of women from Middle America were going to tell me something about what women truly craved in cosmetic products.

So I was happy enough to maintain the Roxanne Dubrow fort on Park Avenue while Claudia and Dianne headed off to the Midwest to observe a hand-selected segment of 18-to-24-year-olds who had been deemed our new target market.

I was equally glad when Claudia came back, as Lori had started to angst again over Dennis’s pending applications. “What if he gets in? He doesn’t even talk about what that will mean for us….” she whined during those moments when I clearly hadn’t dumped enough work on her. I found myself nodding sympathetically at the appropriate intervals, all the while wondering if what Dennis did or ultimately didn’t do mattered at all. Lori would either go with him or move on. Life went on no matter how much we angsted over it. This was one of the wisdoms that age had brought me. I took some measure of comfort in the idea that I was free from all the pining that came from being twenty-three. It was all so useless in the long run, wasn’t it?

But as much as I hoped to disregard the pinings of youth, once Claudia dumped the focus group findings on me to review, I found myself deluged in information about what the 18-to-24-year-old female wanted most. At least when it came to her appearance.

She wanted color. Lots of it. Shine, sparkle, glitter.

She wanted to stand out. Be unique.

She wanted to be strong, yet feminine. A lithe athlete in strawberry-scented lip gloss.

She owned an average of two Juicy Couture outfits, spent more time surfing the Internet than she did watching TV and preferred cosmetics called “Don’t Quit Your Day Job” to the more descriptive “Passionfruit Pink.”

I also learned that the person she most aspired to be was Irina Barbalovich.

Which is exactly why Roxanne Dubrow, or more specifically, Dianne, wanted her to be their new face.

And so the wooing began. It was simple enough at first. Not many people in the fashion industry turned down a personal phone call from Dianne Dubrow, least of all Mimi Blaustein, CEO of Turner Modeling Agency and agent to its current star property, Irina.

As with most relationships, the courtship began with food. Lunch was promptly arranged. And because a lot was riding on this relationship, restaurant selection was of the utmost importance. Lori was promptly sent on a mission to uncover Irina’s preferences.

This was not such a difficult mission. The Internet was rife with interviews and sites devoted to Irina. Apparently the entire universe wanted to know what Irina wanted, and I had to assume, since no one knew Irina from any other nineteen-year-old up until recently, this desire was that her hips were slight enough and her abs tight enough to make her irresistible in a pair of low-slung jeans; that her bust-to-hip ratio made her absolutely stunning in most any fabric a designer draped on her.

What Lori uncovered was that Irina was a vegan of the worst kind. Nondairy. Wheat-free. And wholly organic.

Thank God we were in New York City, probably the only place in the world where you could find a restaurant that was up-to-the-moment chic yet capable of creating well-presented plates featuring food that had not been tortured during its lifespan, sprayed with pesticides, kept alive by antibiotics or mishandled in any way, shape or form.

That restaurant was Mandela, a short walk away on Madison Avenue, and usually a month-long wait for a reservation. Unless you happened to be dining with Irina, of course.

Miraculously, or not so miraculously depending on how you looked at it, Mandela just so happened to have an opening during the very two-hour spread that Mimi’s assistant had allotted for Irina to make herself available to Dianne Dubrow and Co.

The reservation was made for six people, according to the hastily scrawled note Claudia had left lying on Lori’s desk, which I had come across while dropping off some files.

Six? It seemed like a curious number. Irina and her agent. Claudia, Dianne and me. Who was the sixth? I wondered.

It certainly wasn’t Lori, because although she had, through her administrative support, probably worked as hard as I had to prepare us for this meeting, she never got to enjoy the perks like Claudia and I did. It could have been Lana Jacobs, though we generally didn’t bring in PR at this point—not until we had the prospective model on board. Mark Sulzberg from Legal? Way too soon for that. It wasn’t like Irina was ready to sign a contract with us yet, especially since we weren’t the only players in the fashion industry vying for Irina’s hand.

It could have been Phillip Landau, the up-and-coming photographer who had first captured Irina for Vogue. The two had become almost inseparable since that career-boosting fashion spread, and their constant camaraderie might have sparked rumors of romance, if not for the fact that Phillip was gay.

Still curious, I popped my head into Claudia’s office. “So who’s going to lunch next week?” I inquired.

Claudia looked up from the issue of W she’d been poring over, whether because she was trend-spotting or simply gathering ammunition for her next shopping spree I wasn’t sure.

“Lunch?” Claudia said, gazing up at me in what looked like a drug-induced fog. She was shopping, I decided. Nothing else could put a glaze like the one I saw in Claudia’s eyes right now like the pursuit of the latest handbag or cut of trouser.

“With Irina?”

Her gaze sharpened up immediately, as if the very utterance of Irina’s name put all her senses on full alert. “Well, Irina and Mimi, of course. Me and Dianne,” she said, ticking off each name on the tips of her manicured fingers. “Michael—”

“Michael Dubrow?” I asked, startled. “Why is he coming?”

Claudia eyed me speculatively. I must have been showing a little more emotion than the situation warranted.

Hoping to dispel any suspicion I may have caused, I said, “It just seems peculiar that the vice president of our Overseas Division is attending a lunch to woo our latest model, don’t you think?” Even as I said the words with the veneer of cool indifference that had become my trademark, new anxiety washed over me. I hadn’t seen Michael at close range for quite some time. Shortly after our affair, he had taken over management of the Overseas Division, which kept him out of the country a lot. When he was in the States, he usually worked out of the Long Island office, and even if he did come to New York, he was easy enough to avoid, seeing as the doors to the family town house in Sutton Place weren’t exactly open to all. The few times I did find myself in meetings with him in our Park Avenue offices, there were enough other people in the room for me to maintain a cool, corporate indifference to him from across the room. But the intimacy of sitting across a table in a restaurant from Michael suddenly seemed like too much to bear. It surprised me to what extent he could unravel me after all this time. Maybe I was getting soft in my old age.

“I believe he’s coming to escort Courtney,” she said, feasting her gaze once more on the magazine before her.

“Courtney?”

“Courtney Manchester. The new director of R & D?” she said, looking at me again. “I guess he feels responsible for her. Or something,” she continued. “After all, he did, in a sense, acquire her, right along with the Sparkle line. Knowing him, he probably wants to claim the company’s new baby as his own so he can reap all the glory once Roxy D takes off.” She snorted. “But I suppose with the amount of money this company is dropping on this product, something glorious is bound to happen.”

As Claudia moved on to her typical rant about how Michael—or even Dianne, for that matter—didn’t know a thing about successfully marketing a product beyond throwing a bunch of money at it, I nodded absently, my mind whirling with the implications of what she had just told me. For a brief moment, I wasn’t even sure what bothered me more: the fact that I suspected Michael was openly wooing his next conquest or the fact that, clearly, I was not a main player in Roxanne Dubrow’s next big campaign. I hadn’t even been invited to this fucking lunch.

Before the steam visibly shot out of my ears, I interrupted Claudia’s tirade with a hurried excuse about a call I needed to make to a sales rep, then headed straight for my office, closing the door behind me.

And while I sat there contemplating the fact that my future at Roxanne Dubrow was not as rosy as I had once thought, I found myself clicking on the e-mail archive where I had filed the semiannual corporate newsletters we received.

Glancing through the file, I quickly located the newsletter announcing Roxanne Dubrow’s acquisition of Sparkle and opened it up, my eyes seeking out the article—and more specifically, the photo of Courtney Manchester I had barely glanced at when it first arrived. But I took it all in now.

Like Courtney Manchester’s winning smile. Her russet hair and sparkling green eyes.

Michael always was a sucker for a pretty face. And this one was downright irresistible to him, I was sure.

If he wasn’t sleeping with her yet, it was only a matter of time.

To think I had once let this man inside me without a condom.

But not even my anger could squash the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Why did this bother me so much? I had dumped better men than Michael since, at least in terms of how available Drew or Ethan had made themselves to me.

Because you loved him, a little voice whispered, as I remembered how many nights I had lain awake during our affair, wishing he weren’t so powerful, so ambitious, so hard to nail down for more than just some fleeting yet utterly intimate encounters.

Is that what love was? Longing followed by pain and loss?

If that was true, I didn’t want any part of it.